Kathryn Bigelow (2008[1])
There were plenty of American films in the late 1960s and early 1970s which seemed or claimed to be informed by what was happening in Vietnam and by the war’s effects on the American psyche. Apart from The Green Berets (1968), however, I don’t remember high profile films set in Vietnam – or set in America but principally about the war – appearing in cinemas while the conflict was still going on. In contrast, the war(s) on terror since 2001 have regularly provided the main substance of dramatic features for several years now. Some of these are set in the war zone (Redacted in Iraq, A Mighty Heart – which I think of as part of this group – in Pakistan); most or all of the action in others (Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, Stop-Loss) is back in the USA but they all explicitly concern military operations which are, to put it mildly, unfinished business. The Hurt Locker – set almost entirely in Iraq (in 2004) and focusing on the work there of a bomb disposal (Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD)) unit in the last days before the completion of their current tour of duty – is being lauded as the best picture so far to come out of the present conflicts. That might seem to be damning with faint praise but this is a good, strong film, even if it’s also a limited one.
The Hurt Locker opens with the following words on the screen – ‘The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug’. The words are attributed to Chris Hedges who, according to Wikipedia, is a New York Times journalist and the author of a 2002 book called War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. The epigraph is bluntly didactic: Kathryn Bigelow and her scenarist Mark Boal (who also wrote the short story on which In the Valley of Elah is based) announce the moral of the story before they’ve begun to tell it. That gets the film off on the wrong foot but it’s quickly forgotten. The Hurt Locker is rarely a wordy film; it’s certainly not the words you take away from it with you. The picture is divided into sections which provide a countdown to the end of the US Army Bravo Company’s time in Iraq (it begins with thirty-some days to go and the last main sequence is two days before departure). The trio that comprises the EOD unit is a team leader, whose job it is to inspect and defuse ‘improvised explosive devices’ (IEDs), and two colleagues who (in the words of Wikipedia) ‘communicate with their team leader via radio inside his bombsuit, and provide him with rifle cover while he examines an IED’. At the start of the film, the current team leader – who is well liked by both the other men (Sergeant J T Sanborn and Specialist Owen Eldridge) – is killed by a remotely-detonated IED. He is replaced by Sergeant (First Class) Will James.
The specifically dated ‘chapter headings’ recall the way in which Steven Soderbergh tried to give some shape to Che Guevara’s Bolivian campaign in the second part of his Che. The Che diptych was impressive chiefly in Soderbergh’s recreation of the guerrilla warfare and it’s the documentary tightness of Kathryn Bigelow’s approach that draws you in here. The Hurt Locker, which was shot in Jordan, gets across strongly – but not obviously – how alien the place is to the Americans. The muezzin cries seem unusually muted for a picture set in this part of the world – as if to indicate how meaningless they are to the soldiers. In city or desert, the land’s dusty barrenness and culture signify nothing to them, except continuous threat. The soldiers see groups of Iraqis watching them from the side of a street or the balcony of an apartment block: sometimes the watchers are merely curious – innocuous but vaguely hostile; sometimes they look much the same until they display their explosive undergarments or detonate an IED through their mobile phone. There’s another aspect to the alien element, in images that evoke science fiction: James and his predecessor in bomb suits that suggest astronaut outfits; the little vehicle the team sends out in the first sequence to (I assumed) detect devices, and which trundled and beeped like a leftover from Star Wars. The two best-known actors in the picture are Guy Pearce and Ralph Fiennes: Pearce is the team leader who dies in the opening sequence; Fiennes is a British contract soldier, whose group the OED trio joins, and who is killed, in a desert firefight with insurgent snipers. The quick deaths of the bigger names in the cast might almost be making the point that ‘real’ screen war is no respecter of box-office hierarchy. In the first half hour or so of the picture, we seem to be watching the unit as if they were people in a documentary – men at highly dangerous work rather than characters in a drama. But The Hurt Locker also demonstrates how hard it is to sustain objectivity throughout a technically fictional dramatic feature. Bigelow and Boal meet this challenge in different ways, and with differing degrees of success.
Each of the sequences in and around Baghdad – the attempts to defuse IEDs or the desert battle – amounts to a set piece. The hyper-realistic way in which these sequences are filmed makes them all the more suspenseful. One of the conventional dramatic subplots to which the filmmakers resort is – in this quasi-documentary context – jarringly predictable: the affable Colonel Cambridge says he’s spent his fair share of time in the field in the course of his career and the frightened young EOD unit member Eldridge scoffs (‘Where was that – Yale?’); one day, Cambridge comes out from behind his desk to join the team in their work and is killed. A much shrewder decision on the part of Bigelow and Boal is to concentrate increasingly on the character of Sergeant James: his near-craziness may be designed to demonstrate the truth of that opening epigraph but the line between his loco behaviour and his maverick heroism is very blurred: the viewer naturally welcomes James’s providing a main focus for attention and roots for him.
The development of the subplot concerning James’s friendship with an Iraqi kid, nicknamed ‘Beckham’, who sells dodgy DVDs to the American soldiers, is more complicated and more successful than the Colonel Cambridge one. When James discovers the dead body of a child who’s been surgically implanted with an unexploded bomb, he’s sure it’s Beckham and he impulsively sets out to find who turned the kid into a ‘body bomb’. His actions may be unwise (and James discovers next day that Beckham is alive and well) but they’re emotionally appealing – and the film needs this. By this stage, Sanborn and Eldridge have both had enough of James. He’s recklessly independent, turned on by the adrenaline of his work at the knife-edge between life and death; he keeps a box of memorabilia under his bed, containing a small piece of each of the devices he’s defused in his OED career. (Eldridge, shot in the leg and stretchered out of the war zone by helicopter, blames James for his injuries.) Yet it’s James, in his and Sanborn’s last major assignment before their tour ends, who makes desperately heroic (and agonisingly unavailing) attempts to save the life of an Iraqi man forced to wander into a checkpoint with a time-bomb strapped to his chest. Jeremy Renner is impressive in the role: he gets you to see and believe that drawing on the mentally unstable part of himself is James’s way of coping with the situation that he’s in. (All three of the team indulge in physically punishing rough-housing as a way of relaxing when they’re off duty.) Renner’s ordinary appearance is important too: even if James is a hot dog compared with his colleagues, he looks like everyman. Anthony Mackie made a good impression in Half Nelson and confirms it here. It’s a pity that he’s saddled, in his final scene, with a short but nonetheless clunky speech in which Sanborn reveals to James, as they return to the base, that he can no longer cope with the pressure of being in an OED team and wants to start a family when he gets back home. Brian Geraghty is all right as Eldridge, although he doesn’t register as strongly as Renner or Mackie. (You seem to ‘lose’ him as soon as he puts a helmet on: that might of course be intentional but there’s no such anonymising effect when James and Sanborn do the same.)
Probably because I naturally prefer watching the drama of domestic tensions to anything involving the theatre of war, I particularly welcomed the few scenes of James back in America with his wife and infant son – especially the bit when they’re supermarket shopping. Stephanie Zacharek’s fine review in Salon reveals that this is taken:
‘a bit shamelessly, from Paul Mazursky’s “Moscow on the Hudson,” in which Russian defector Robin Williams finds himself overwhelmed by choice in an American supermarket; [Bigelow] might have found another way to make her point about the glut of creature comforts American life has to offer.’
Even so, I liked the way that Jeremy Renner threw a half-hearted punch at the massed ranks of cereal packets. When James and his wife are back home, he’s helping to prepare dinner – washing mushrooms, peeling carrots – and you get a strong sense of what he needs to talk about and won’t. He does that in the next scene – to his little boy, who’s too young to understand a word.
The final shots of the film convey their message as baldly as the opening epigraph: we see James emerging from a plane in Iraq ‘365 days’ before the end of his new tour of duty with an OED team in Delta Company. Perhaps Bigelow and Boal make their points this crudely – and in the few, usually awkward monologues in which characters reveal their ‘true’ selves – because, for the most part, the characters don’t get to explain their motivations or political views and the filmmakers, unnecessarily but understandably, feel the need to fill this gap. That lack of explanation actually makes the men’s situation seem more irrational – and more powerful as a result. And the lack of explanation in the film of its title is intriguing. The New York magazine web page which includes David Edelstein’s excellent note also includes the following thoughts of Jeremy Renner:
‘… the title of film “took on different meanings” over the course of the shoot. At first, it represented the threat of death and [Renner] thought of it as “a casket.” Later on, he says, it “became a physical place, because we had one outhouse for 250 people, and we were all getting sick: I’d say, ‘I have to go to the hurt locker.’ ” Finally, it became “this spiritual place of anguish,” he says. “It was 125 degrees, the bomb suit was 100 pounds. By the end, we were completely stripped of our dignity and self-respect.” After returning to California, he says, “I was in a kind of spiritual hurt locker for three months.”’
With Christian Camargo (as Colonel Cambridge), David Morse (as a more gung-ho American colonel), Christopher Sayegh (Beckham), Suhail Aldabbach (the suicide bomber at the checkpoint) and Evangeline Lilly (James’s wife). The cinematography is by Barry Ackroyd, editing by Chris Innis and Bob Murawski, production design by Karl Juliusson. The special effects were created by a team led by Richard Stutsman. The urgent, effective score is by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders.
7 September 2009
[1] The film had its first public release, in Italy (after showing at the Venice Film Festival), in 2008; and received nominations for Independent Spirit awards for that year. It wasn’t publicly released in the USA until June 2009.
